How to forecast your bank account balance

Forecasting your bank balance means projecting what your account will hold on a future date, based on the money you expect to come in and go out between now and then. Done well, it answers the question that matters most: will I have enough to cover everything before my next paycheck? This guide explains the method, and how TallyMint does it for you automatically.

What a balance forecast actually is

A balance forecast starts with your current balance and walks it forward day by day. For each upcoming day, you add expected income (paychecks, deposits) and subtract expected expenses (rent, utilities, subscriptions, loan payments). The result is a projected balance for every day in the period, usually shown as a line that rises on paydays and steps down as bills hit.

The manual way

You can do this by hand in a spreadsheet:

• List every recurring bill and its due date for the next 30 to 90 days.
• List expected income and the dates it lands.
• Start with today's balance, then add and subtract each item in date order.
• Track the running total so you can see the lowest point it reaches.

This works, but it is tedious to maintain. Every time a bill amount changes, a payday shifts, or you add a new subscription, you have to update the sheet, and it is easy to forget something.

The automatic way with TallyMint

TallyMint was built around this exact problem. You enter your recurring bills and income once, with their amounts and schedules, and TallyMint projects your balance forward automatically:

• Pick a horizon: 30, 60, or 90 days.
• TallyMint charts your projected balance day by day, using your recurring items plus anything already in your register.
• It highlights the lowest balance you will hit in the period, so you can spot a shortfall before it happens.
• Recurring bills can auto-enter on their due dates, or a set number of days earlier if you prefer to see them in the register sooner, so the forecast stays accurate without manual upkeep.

Instead of rebuilding a spreadsheet every month, you glance at a chart and immediately see whether the next few weeks are comfortable or tight.

Including your budgets in the forecast

Recurring bills are only half of what leaves your account. Groceries, fuel and the rest are real money too, and a forecast that ignores them reads more comfortably than your month actually is. If you keep budgets, you can switch on Include budget items above the projection chart, and TallyMint will also carry the money you have budgeted but not yet spent.

• It is off by default, and only appears once you have a budget for the current month or later.
• Budgeted money is spread evenly across the days remaining in the month, at the pace your budget implies, so the line stays smooth instead of dropping in steps.
• If you underspend, the unspent part simply does not get projected. Your forecast will not lurch downward on the last day of the month to make you "finish" a budget you never spent.
• Anything already accounted for is never counted twice. A scheduled bill or an entered transaction in a budgeted category is deducted from that budget first, so it lands on the chart once, not twice.

That last point surprises people, so TallyMint tells you when it applies: if your scheduled bills already use up a category's budget, a line under the setting says how much of this month's budget is already committed. That way an unchanged chart reads as an answer rather than a bug.

Why this is worth doing

A balance forecast turns "I think I'm okay" into "I know I'm okay until the 27th, when it gets tight." It is the difference between reacting to an overdraft and seeing it coming a month out. For anyone living between paychecks, or just trying to time a large purchase, it is the single most useful thing personal finance software can do. It is also the feature TallyMint is built around, and a big reason people pick it as a Quicken alternative they pay for once instead of every year.

If you used Mint to forecast your balance

Mint, the free budgeting app from Intuit, shut down in 2024, and people who relied on it to see their money ahead of time are still looking for a replacement. If that is what brought you here, the forecast described above is the closest thing TallyMint has to a headline feature: your actual account balance projected day by day, 30, 60, or 90 days out, built from your real recurring bills and income, with the lowest point highlighted before it arrives. The forecast is built from bills and income you enter, so you do not need your old Mint data to start, and you can run TallyMint either as a Windows desktop app you buy once or as TallyMint Web in any browser. TallyMint is an independent product, not affiliated with Intuit or Mint.

Frequently asked questions

Related: What is TallyMint? · Quicken alternative · FAQ